Khurshed Mazhar

Lab of things: a platform for conducting studies with connected devices in multiple homes

Researchers who develop new home technologies using connected devices often want to conduct large-scale field studies in homes to evaluate their technology, but conducting such studies today is extremely challenging. Inspired by the success of PlanetLab, which enabled development and evaluation of global network services, we are developing a shared infrastructure for home environments, called Lab of Things. Our goal is to substantially lower the barrier to developing and evaluating new technologies for the home environment.

HomeLab: a platform for conducting experiments with connected devices in the home

The downward spiral in the cost of connected devices and sensors (e.g., cameras, motion sensors, remote controlled light switches) has generated a vast amount of interest towards using them in the home environments. Companies and researchers are developing technologies that employ these devices in a diverse range of ways. These include improving energy efficiency, increasing comfort and convenience through automation, implementing security and monitoring, and providing in-home healthcare. However, conducting experimental work in this domain is extremely challenging today. Evaluating the effectiveness of research prototypes typically requires some form of deployment in real homes. This task is riddled with not only social and legal constraints, but also logistical and technical hurdles. Examples include recruiting participants, hardware and software setup in the home, training participants and residents who typically possess varying levels of technical expertise, and diverse security and privacy concerns. Because of these challenges, individual research groups rarely manage to deploy their prototypes on more than a dozen or so homes concentrated in their geographic area. Such deployments tend to lack the scale and diversity that is needed to confidently answer the research hypothesis. Our goal is to lower the barrier towards deploying experimental technology in a large number of geographically distributed homes.